How to Organize Your Business With AI

Get three things in place before you build anything

First, be in Claude Cowork on the desktop app. Cowork runs on the web and on mobile too, but local connectors are a desktop thing, and the desktop app is what's on screen in the video.

Second, check which model you're on. Sonnet is more than enough here. This build reads connected data, understands what you're asking, and assembles a page. Nothing about it needs a heavier model.

Third, have your connectors on. Connected is not enough. They have to be toggled on, in your connector settings. That's an easy one to miss and it stops everything.

Connect your tools, read only

Go to your connector settings and find the tool in the list.

When it asks about permissions, choose read only. Grant access opens the tool in a browser window, you sign in, go through the security verification, click allow, then open.

This build used three: Square for sales, Google Calendar for appointments, Notion for the content calendar. You could add Gmail, Google Drive, Slack. Start with what you actually check every morning.

If it doesn't show up, restart before you retry

Covered above, and it's worth its own step because it will cost you twenty minutes otherwise.

Close Cowork completely, reopen, check connector settings.

Describe the job, don't write one perfect prompt

Tell Claude what you want the dashboard to do and what it should pull from, then work the rest out in conversation.

Trying to write one prompt that specifies everything is the slow way round, and it's how people end up with a dashboard shaped like their prompt instead of their business.

If your appointments live in one specific calendar rather than your default, say which one.

Let it read the tools before it builds

Watch what happens next, because this is the part that makes the output real.

Before writing a line of code, Claude goes and checks each connected tool. It reads Square, then the calendar, then Notion. It asks permission before each one, and you click allow.

That means the dashboard gets built from what's actually in those tools, not from a generic layout with placeholder numbers in it.

Ask it to interview you

The first version will have the right structure and connect to the right data. That's not the same as being useful at seven in the morning.

Most people don't know exactly what they need on a dashboard, and that's fine. Ask Claude to interview you about the business instead of guessing.

It asks what the morning actually looks like. Where the information lives: in an app, in a file, or only in your head. Which revenue numbers matter. What kind of content is in there and what status each piece has. What gets scheduled. What decisions you have to make every day. And, best question of the set, what is not useful.

Then it summarises what it understood. Read that summary properly and check what it missed.

Fix the design last, and show rather than describe

Once it's showing the right things, then make it look right.

If you can't describe the look you want, screenshot a dashboard you like and upload it. Claude reads images and it will use one as direction, which beats arguing about colours in words.

There's also a skill for this. Skills are built in guides that tell Claude how to handle a specific job, and the Theme Factory skill, from Anthropic, is the one for improving how artifacts look. Find it in your skills list, read the description, click install.

Ask for charts rather than paragraphs. First thing in the morning you want to scan, not read.